Leopold Engel

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Leopold Engel

Leopold Engel (born April 19, 1858 in Saint Petersburg , † November 8, 1931 in Berlin ) was an actor, occultist , spiritualist , theosophist , esoteric writer and founder of the World Illuminati .

Life

Karl Dietrich Engel (1824–1913), the father of Leopold Engel, a violinist from a family of musicians from Oldenburg, was from 1846 concertmaster in the orchestra of the Russian State Theater . After his retirement the family moved to Germany. The family lived in several stages in Berlin, Bremen , Oldenburg and Dresden , where Leopold Engel attended school.

At the age of 22, Engels began his acting career with appearances in Koblenz , Oldenburg, Stuttgart , St. Pölten and Laibach . He worked as a Faust bibliographer. In 1898 he finally turned his back on the stage.

Engel wrote groschen novels for the Loreley and Rheingold series under the pseudonym L. Eckhard .

Act as a spiritual healer

In 1881 Engel im Kürschner is listed as a "naturopath" and "magnetopath" living in Dresden. For a long time he worked as a "natural healer" for a professor in Leipzig. Due to his ability to empathize, he is said to have been able to intuitively make diagnoses. As a spiritual healer , he occasionally hypnotized his patients, who are said to have given him treatment advice in the somnambulistic state , including the instruction not to extend somnambulistic sleep for more than 20 minutes, because otherwise the soul would find it difficult to gain a foothold in the body.

Foundation of the Illuminati Order

Engel first met the occultist Theodor Reuss in 1895, when he wanted to renew the Illuminati order of Adam Weishaupt in Berlin. To the historical Illuminati order of Weishaupt, which finally ceased to exist in 1793, there was at best an ideal, but no historical connection. Reuss claimed that the old remains of the order still existed. This turned out to be a false pretense, because apart from antiquarian writings there were no points of contact. Since friends of Engel had already paid entrance fees, the foundation was still carried out. The curriculum and organization were created by angels; Reuss was not significantly involved in the re-establishment of the order.

Between 1896 and 1897, Engel became a board member and secretary of the World Association of Illuminati . He fell out with Reuss shortly afterwards and both went their separate ways from 1902. As a result, Engels wrote a new statute for a Dresden-based World Association of Illuminati in 1903 , which had to be closed in 1924 due to the decline in membership. In 1926 there is a new entry at the Berlin-Tempelhof district court in the name of the World Association of Illuminati .

Theosophical Society

Engel was a member of the Theosophical Society in America and was elected treasurer of the newly founded Theosophical Society in Europe (Germany) (TGE) on August 30, 1896, under the direction of Franz Hartmann .

In 1902 Engel and Reuss tried to found a German branch of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), which was unsuccessful. Shortly before the start of the Nazi regime, Julius Meyer inherited the large Engels library and became his successor as Grand Master of the Illuminati Association.

End of life

In his old age, Leopold Engel received only a small pension, got into great hardship in Berlin after the First World War and fell ill. In Das Wort , the organ of the Lorber movement at that time, donations were repeatedly asked for him and his family. Engel sold pictures of Christ whose reproduction rights had been granted to him by the painter Hermann Schmiechen , who died in 1924 . He died in 1931, leaving behind a wife and five children.

Volume 11 of the Great Gospel of John

From 1891 to 1893 the 11th volume of the Great Gospel of John (GEJ) was written according to "inner word dictation". It is the only work by Engels that, according to Jakob Lorber, he claims to have been dictated directly by Jesus Christ .

According to her own account, Engel was ordered to write it down by an inner voice. He claims that he has made himself available as a medium and that the 11th volume was transmitted through an acoustically perceptible voice.

The content and style of the eleventh volume are similar to those of Lorber's ten volumes; the presentation of the event is, however, shorter and more sober. This additional volume is accepted or at least tolerated in the Lorber movement , but sharply rejected by the fundamentalists because of differences and because of Engel's writing of Lucifer's Confessions (as Lucifer's medium ).

Particularly questionable is the fact that Leopold Engel only claims to have worked as a prophet for a time, because after the eleventh volume he only wrote productions that serve the occult and spiritualist movements of the early twentieth century, without any divine claims.

Publications

  • The valley of the happy or the way to the truth. 2nd Edition. Bitterfeld 1888 (report on a people in Central Africa unaffected by rationalism; here a topic that was only briefly mentioned in Lorber's work is detailed)
  • John, the great gospel . Vol. 11, 1891-1893; Lorber-Verlag, Bietigheim, ISBN 3-87495-130-8
  • Catechism of German Theosophy. Dresden 1893
  • Rays of light. A theosophical worldview of the Germanic tribe. Bitterfeld 1897
  • History of the Illuminati Order . A contribution to the history of Bavaria. Bermühler, Berlin 1906; Reprints: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauung, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-921513-35-9 ; Facsimile publishing house, Bremen 1985
  • Course of self and human knowledge. 1910 (according to self-testimony after more than ten years of preparatory work; quintessence according to Möller / Howe: Beware of the gods: Venus, Bacchus and Mars)
  • Mallona. The last days of a lost planet. 1911; Turm-Verlag, Bietigheim 1998, ISBN 3-7999-0044-6 (history of the planet Mallona, ​​which fell into the asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, channeled through a young female medium using a ring; explains in detail the formation of the asteroid belt, which is only briefly mentioned in the Lorber work )
  • In the afterlife. Guides of a soul. Announcement of an otherworldly. 1922; Lorber-Verlag, Bietigheim, ISBN 3-87495-002-6 (The afterlife story of Leopold Engel's father; builds on Lorber's works about the afterlife: Bishop Martin, Robert Blum and The Spiritual Sun )
  • Lucifer's Confessions. An epic in 8 songs. Renatus-Verlag, Lorch 1928; Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-921513-73-1 (Leopold Engel was convinced that Lucifer's confessions were dictated to him by Satan himself; Satan returns to God as a repentant "prodigal son"; one of Engel's probably independent in-depth presentation of this topic can be found in the works of Anita Wolf.)

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Leopold Engel  - Sources and full texts

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b The Great Gospel of John , Volume 11, Foreword
  2. ↑ a b c d Horst E. Miers : Lexicon of Secret Knowledge (= Esoteric. Vol. 12179). Original edition; and 3rd updated edition, both Goldmann, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-442-12179-5 , pp. 195–196 and 587.
  3. ↑ a b c On the memory of Leopold Engel , Heinz Brohm, Das Wort 1/1932, page 31
  4. ↑ a b Ellic Howe & Helmut Möller: Reuss: Irregular Freemasonry in Germany, 1900-23 . In: AQC. February 16, 1978
  5. ↑ Marco Pasi: Aleister Crowley and the temptation of politics . Ares-Verlag, Graz 2006. p. 286.
  6. ↑ Leopold Engel: History of the Illuminati Order. 1906, p. 467
  7. ↑ Marco Pasi: Aleister Crowley and the temptation of politics . Ares-Verlag, Graz 2006. p. 42.
  8. ↑ Harald Lamprecht : Overview of the history of the Theosophical Societies in Germany (supplementary material to the book New Rosicrucians )
  9. ^ "Call for the writer of the Johannesschluß", Das Wort 4/1921, page 16 // "Beautiful Pictures", Das Wort 12/1926, page 282
  10. ↑ Dieter Ulmer: Lorber movement between fundamentalism and subjectivism
  11. ↑ Gerd Gutemann: Completion of Lorbers' Gr. Gospel of John by Leopold Engel?
personal data
SURNAME Engel, Leopold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Actor, occultist, theosophist and founder of the Illuminati Order
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 1931
Place of death Berlin